


Call It Another Lonely Day

by ishie



Series: Yesterday's Gone [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode V: Empire Strikes Back, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Gen, I mean really, Post-Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, Pregnancy, who among us hasn't been visited by the ghost of our dead mass murderer father
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-17
Updated: 2018-05-17
Packaged: 2019-05-08 02:31:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14684589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishie/pseuds/ishie
Summary: Leia isn't one for rash decisions, but sometimes... Yeah, sometimes, all she has is rash decisions.





	Call It Another Lonely Day

**Author's Note:**

> I got the prompt "15. — afterlife" on Tumblr. Thanks, [Odyle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Odyle/pseuds/Odyle)! This is not the slightest bit _Bloodline_ compliant, except by accident.
> 
> The title's Fleetwood Mac all the way. I bet Vader secretly loved them.

Leia isn't one for rash decisions, but sometimes... Yeah, sometimes, all she has is rash decisions. Sometimes the idea of taking even five seconds to think about everything she's gone through is almost enough to send her marching stiff-legged, with hands fisted and palms gouged, toward the nearest airlock. 

It took months of steady refusals, but she finally managed to get Luke to stop asking her to talk about their biological parents. Han was somehow quicker on the uptake about everything else. Probably because pissing her off meant sleeping alone. It only took one night of Leia shutting right the fuck down when Han tried to gently coax something resembling a feeling out of her before he packed it in. 

She doesn't need to process things like they do, with big hurt eyes and pouting and generally making someone feel like an asshole for not rushing to comfort them. Which she still does, mostly because she can't help herself. She likes to feel wanted. Helpful. Like maybe she could have done the whole soft and caring thing, if life turned out differently. Is that such a crime?

Okay, Leia probably does need to process things a little more constructively. Or openly. Or, uh, at all. That's what the doctor keeps telling her, anyway. As if every time she winds up in the infirmary it's down to unresolved emotional issues. As if skyrocketing blood pressure or another tension headache isn't exactly what you get when you're trying to hold a galaxy together while it keeps trying to split itself apart. 

But she's not going to dwell on sorrow or loss or whatever else it everybody thinks she ought to do. There are manifests to review, diplomats to soothe, and troop movements to correct -- still, _always_. Even when a war is over, it's never really over. Treaties are only words until they're backed up with action, and the only action anyone in this forsaken galaxy still respects is military.

Stars, but she's tired.

Is it any surprise that she plays things close to her vest, when everyone everywhere already knows what's best for her? Of course, close gets farther away every day as the body beneath it keeps expanding and she can hardly find two seconds to herself at any point of whatever passes for day or night.

Leia does manage to find a few blessedly quiet minutes alone one night, though. Han is boneless and snoring into her pillow a few bulkheads away. Chewie is wherever he goes when he can't stand being around them any longer. Her comm hasn't so much as chirped in half their current planet's day, which is a miracle all on its own.

She leans against the wall in the Falcon's galley, with Han's shirt barely stretching over her enormous belly to cover her ass. The cycled air feels deliciously cool on her sweaty legs. The slice of shim-bay crispa she's cramming into her mouth is sweet and sticky. Her most pressing problem is that she'll be digging the flakes of pastry out of her cleavage for days. The sonic is on its last legs, as per usual, and this lull between crises won't last long enough to get it repaired.

Obviously, then, that's when she opens her eyes and finds herself staring directly into a broad chest covered in glowing blue Jedi robes.

"You've got to be kriffing kidding me," she spits when she sees the face that goes with the robes.

 _Jedi robes_. The nerve of this fucking guy!

"Hello, Leia."

"NO," she yells, pointing in his face with all the self-righteous frustration of Han after she caught him disconnecting the power cell in her comm. "You don't get to call me that."

How is it possible that a ghost can _sigh_?

"It's your name, isn't it?"

"Not to you, buddy." She shoves the last of the crispa in her mouth and does her best to sail past Anakin Fucking Skywalker with her nose as far up in the air as she can manage. 

Probably it would have gone better if she could still gauge the size of her own body, but, well. With any luck there are no side effects from a little bit of Force ghost brushing through one's child in utero.

She's halfway down the corridor that leads to the main cargo bay when he reappears in front of her. This time she manages to stop far enough away that no part of her touches any part of whatever he is. 

"I want to apologize."

"Tough poodoo."

"Your brother--"

Leia doesn't bother to respond, just turns on one heel and marches in the opposite direction. The air is cold on her legs, now, stirring the hair she can't be bothered to remove. She's almost around the bend when she remembers she's not wearing any pants.

Yanking on the hem of the shirt still doesn't do enough to cover her ass -- or, she belatedly realizes, her crotch -- but Leia does it again anyway when she enters the crew lounge and finds Anakin fitfully poking at the target Luke refuses to stow properly. She refuses to blush, though. 

"Saying 'I want to apologize' is meaningless, anyway. Either you apologize or you don't. No one gives a shit about intentions. Especially not yours."

He considers that for a moment. His lip twitches enough that she wishes he were alive again just so she could kill him for laughing at her. "Would you accept my apology?"

Now she laughs, which is absolutely not at all the thing she wanted to do, but hey.

For some reason, that makes him smile. It looks ghastly on him, which is entirely down to the fact that he's a mass murdering lunatic and not the slightest bit related to his pallor or the horrible burn scars that cover most of his visible skin.

"A boy?" he asks, flicking one finger toward her belly.

Leia slaps both hands over herself, as if that could protect her unborn child from anything larger than a sand-flea.

"Don't you kriffing talk to him," she hisses. "Don't even think about him."

Anakin raises both hands and steps back. The dejarik table cuts through him mid-hip, giving him the appearance of a holo projection. "I won't. I promise. I only came here to-- Well, it doesn't matter, does it?"

Of course it doesn't, but he goes on anyway.

"I wanted to see you once, without the mask."

Leia could not possibly care less about what he wants. She can still feel his hands on her shoulders while Tarkin gave the command to destroy Alderaan. Most of the rest of that day is gone from her memory. Not blocked, really, just stuffed into the deepest darkest hole she could make, and covered over with the minutiae of every endless second afterward, until she finally came back to herself enough to take her aggression out on the big, dumb, cute smuggler.

But she remembers Darth Vader's hands on her. How he held her back with so little effort. How she expected to bloom with bruises where he had touched her, but found nothing. 

The puncture marks from the interrogation droid are a different story.

"You've seen me," she says flatly. "So get out."

Leia has spent more hours in the past eight months than she will ever admit in front of her holonet interface. There is a wealth of information if you know where to look for footage from what remains of the Old Republic news orgs. She knows what Anakin looked like as a scrawny youth, as a commander in the Clone Wars, as a monster sealing the fate of hundreds of innocent children. Most of that time she's spent cataloging his features and expressions, scouring every inch for some small measure of herself and Luke in his face. In his gestures, maybe, or the crook of his eyebrow at Obi-Wan Kenobi. Once, he'd tossed his hair out of his eyes like Luke does when they get caught outside and the wind picks up. But she's never seen herself in him.

Until now, when Anakin frowns and says, "I'm _trying_ to get out. Something's holding me here."

That's the same frustrated and angry look she sees in her own reflection about seventeen times a day.

"Don't look at me, buddy." Leia really leans into the _buddy_ , the way Han does when he wants to tweak some priggish officer, but Anakin doesn't seem to notice. Instead it seems like his gaze is turned inward -- whatever inward is to an ethereal manifestation of the Force.

Instead of pulling uselessly at the hem of her shirt again, Leia pinches the skin at the top of her thigh. When it doesn't make Anakin disappear, she grabs the threadbare blanket in the relief bunk and pulls it around herself like a shroud.

"I'm not looking at you," is his mature response. He sounds exactly like Luke in full snit. Leia has to chew on the inside of her cheek to stop another ridiculous impulse to laugh.

They stand there staring at each other for she doesn't know how long. She's starting to feel exhausted again. All the adrenaline leftover from her evening with Han empties out of her as if someone opened a drain.

The relief bunk makes a farting noise when she crawls into it and pulls her legs into some semblance of properly crossed. Under the blanket, she looks more like the back half of an eopie than a human. The comparison takes her by surprise. Eopies are native to Tatooine, like the sand-fleas she thought of earlier. It's strange that she would think of them first when she's only been to Tatooine the once, though of course both Anakin and Luke were born there.

She really hopes Anakin isn't in her head.

"Can't you just undo whatever it is that got you here in the first place?"

"No." He doesn't look like he wants to say more, but he does. "I don't know how I got here."

"Fantastic."

He moves away from the dejarik table, finally, though Leia immediately wishes he would go back. It's much easier to deal with the ghost of your dead tormentor-slash-biological-father-slash-murderer-of-your-entire-identity when he looks like something you pulled up out of a bad holonovel.

Instead, Anakin paces around the lounge area with his hands clasped behind his back and his head bowed in thought. His robes swish soundlessly over the decking. 

Leia settles deeper into the bunk, as best she can while tangled in a blanket and carrying a whole other person somewhere under her heart.

"Maybe you called me here," Anakin says at last. 

She barely has the energy to bristle. "Hardly."

"I didn't even know I knew how to incorporate to this extent." 

"What, your old Jedi buddies didn't teach you everything they know?"

His whole face droops when she says this. That's... That shouldn't be allowed. Anakin Skywalker shouldn't get to pop up in the middle of the night, and follow her around while her ass is hanging out of her boyfriend's shirt and her boobs are already itchy with crispa crumbs, and look _sad_. He murdered stars only knew how many beings, including the aforementioned Jedi buddies, almost every last one of them. He helped to murder her _entire planet_. He doesn't get to show remorse. He doesn't get to stir up this stupid instinct she somehow still has to comfort lost boys and bestow forgiveness on the barely penitent.

"Right," she says, as if she had forgotten. She even snaps her fingers. "You killed all of them. They're probably still pissed."

"As they should be."

It lays there in the space between them, all the awful weight of that one phrase. Leia pleats the blanket where it folds over her lap. Over what's left of her lap. The baby tumbles inside her, thankfully keeping all his weight off her bladder for a change. She presses a hand to what could be an elbow to say hello, and the baby quiets again. 

She doesn't try to feel for him in the Force. Not with Anakin's eyes on her. Not without knowing what he can feel, from her and from her son.

So, Leia pleats the blanket, and lets her mind go blank, and tries to slow her breathing the way Luke was always trying to teach her. She stares at the hatch across the way and studiously ignores the glowing figure immediately to the right of it. She doesn't think of a thousand questions she'd like to ask. Doesn't remember the fiery speeches she gave in the Senate chamber directed squarely at his stupid helmeted head. Doesn't see again in her head those surprisingly unbruised shoulders and upper arms in a tarnished mirror on this very ship.

One question does slip out, though. Against her will, like so many other things at his hands.

"Could anyone have stopped you from falling?"

He doesn't answer right away. His shoulders drop and his head hangs forward while he studies the decking again. Leia breathes in, works her hand beneath the blanket to touch the hot skin of her belly. The baby shimmies inside her, and Leia does not look at that thread of darkness that winds through the shining white brightness of him. She does not wonder -- for the millionth time already -- if she is making a mistake. If she can handle this. If she can be as strong as Luke, as loving and open and willing to forgive.

"I don't think," Anakin says slowly, "that anyone could have stopped it. But I don't know. I kept it hidden as long as I could. From myself, even. Maybe if someone had seen it..." He shakes his head. "I don't know. Once I might have hoped so."

The words are barely out of his mouth before he starts to fade into nothing. His dark eyes stay the longest, staring straight into her until they too are gone.

All the hair on her legs stands straight up under the blanket. She presses her nails into her skin, but lightly, a reminder only. To stay grounded. To remember this for as long as she's willing to allow herself before it too goes into that deep dark. The baby flips, his entire body a pulse of love and comfort against her unease. 

Leia isn't one for rash decisions, but sometimes she has no other choice. So, tonight, she decides to let herself believe that everything will be okay.


End file.
